Five birders thrash their local shrubbery for a whole year, to little real effect. One of them does it using a camel, but none of them is into cars....

Sunday, 4 March 2012

A prolonged chat

Early March is a fab time here in Abu Dhabi. When the first
wave of Pied Wheatears arrive, it is game on from now until the third week of
May and you know that you may very well bump into something really neat just
about anytime you go out. This was the case this weekend, despite losing the
Friday to an extra day in work and the first half of the Saturday to a major
emergency just off the island: Great Stone-Plover, the first national record
photographed last September (and then vanished without trace) suddenly reappeared
a few days ago, but remained pretty elusive. However Mark and Graham fired the starting
gun at 0655 on Saturday morning; I realised it had gone off a full hour later
but still managed to have scored fully by 0845, despite inevitably getting lost
in Mussafah en-route. Pretty nifty work by my sluggish standards, especially
for something not in the circle and hence of no relevance here… although I
could just about see the edge of my circle as I scoped back towards the island.
With that safely sorted out, it was back to migrant hunting in the afternoon
and I rapidly added four birds for the year. Rock Thrush was colourful but predictable, but the other three were
much more significant: the first Redstart
of the year was, as hoped for, a glorious samamisicus, and causing me to be
late getting to Emirates Palace where Andrew and Steve had already sorted out a
Hume’s Warbler for me (so I can
concentrate on finding a Radde’s next November) and we then followed that up
with a Sib Stonechat, that, despite the
gale, eventually satisfactorily exposed its tail: variegatus and no
mistake! This is a real mega; there were only 3 national records until a glut
last spring, including two arriving on 5 March. Until now, none have been
recorded on AD island.

Doesn't look too different here:

All important tail pattern was tantalising, to say the least:

The back-up cast included a rare island record of
Southern Grey Shrike (one of four shrike flavours about just now), plenty of Isabelline Wheatears and still both Buff-bellied Pipits. A few wagtails
arriving next day included both a new male Citrine
and feldeggYellows, along with a Northern Wheatear, my earliest ever in
6 years, albeit only by a couple of days.